Auburn officer's charges dropped

BRENTWOOD - The state Attorney General's Office dropped all charges on Tuesday against a retired Auburn police lieutenant accused of stealing a Remington rifle seized from a home in 1992.

The decision to not prosecute David Flight, 52, happened just two weeks before he was to go on trial in Rockingham County Superior Court on charges of receiving stolen property and theft by unauthorized taking.

Flight was accused of stealing a Remington 30-06 that was seized on Dec. 6, 1992, from a home of a man believed to be a felon.

The information gleaned from an initial investigation that began last January did not give the full picture of how Flight - a former prosecutor and evidence officer for the department - came to ultimately have the gun, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

"New credible, evidence regarding the circumstances under which Flight took possession of the weapon has been found," Assistant Attorney General Ben Agati said. "These circumstances and this new evidence will make it difficult for us to go forward and prove the case."

Agati said he could not release any information about the new evidence or information that came to light since Flight's indictment by a grand jury in September.

A state prosecutor came to the Brentwood courthouse on Tuesday around noon to officially dismiss the charges.

Flight's attorney, Eric Wilson, said he appreciated that the Attorney General's Office was willing to further investigate the case which led to the dismissal.

"David has maintained that he did nothing wrong," Wilson said. "Our position is that these charges should not have been brought."

Wilson declined to get into specifics about the new information that led to the dismissal.

"Dave is now working on getting his reputation back," he said.

Flight was a 21-year veteran of the Auburn Police Department when he retired in 2010 in the wake of a town audit that rendered inconclusive results on missing inventory from the department's evidence room.

Neither the police nor town officials ever said what went missing, but Auburn Town Administrator Bill Herman last fall that the 2010 probe did not deal with a stolen firearm.

"I can't provide any details of our internal investigation," Herman said following Flight's indictment in September. "But I can explicitly say, based on what you described, this is not what the town was dealing with in 2010."